Fixing the Sky

by James Rodger Fleming

  One widely publicized appearance of a rainmaker at a fair in Dodge City, Kansas, described a test of the liquid gas bombs:

  Shortly before noon, a special train pulled in bearing the rainmaking contraption on a flatcar. The apparatus was described as a monster mortar, “a sort of cross between a cannon of exceptionally large caliber and a giant slingshot.” The workmen spent hours preparing the equipment for the demonstration. Thousands of people milled around the car, asking questions and offering advice. When the contraption finally was ready, an official of the railroad company quieted the crowd. He said that no one knew whether the apparatus would produce results. He pointed out that the company had the interests of the people at heart and was willing to spend its own money in an effort to produce rain for the district’s crops. Chemical bombs were placed in the cannon and thrown into the air by the slingshot. A dozen or more bombs were discharged, emitting a cloud of yellowish smoke.23

  Reportedly, the crowd was satisfied with the demonstration and fully expected to be drenched soon by a downpour. But nothing happened. The lasting result was equivalent to that of a good fireworks display—memorable but evanescent.

  “An Unfortunate Rain-maker”

  Harper’s Weekly published a spoof of Kansas rainmaking in 1893 with its tale of “an unfortunate rain-maker,” the fictitious Mr. Schermerhorn Montgomery, of Hankinside, Kansas. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that something would go wrong. Montgomery got into legal trouble by causing a flood when he claimed to have made rain: “It did not seem possible that a man could go about carrying, as it were, thunder storms in one pocket and long steady rains in another, and not fall into some sort of a complication with common folks who do not have even a heavy dew in the whole house.”24

  Montgomery advertised that he made it rain only at night and on Sundays. He also claimed responsibility for cool northwesterly winds in the summer, but never charged for them. “I throw in a wind with each rain ordered,” he explained, “the same way you get a baked potato when you order a chop. Fogs, frosts, cloudy days, and aurora borealis extra. Earthquakes should be spoken for two days in advance of the time needed” (735).

  One morning after a particularly heavy rain, Montgomery set out to collect $1 from every farmer in the county for his services, but he met with considerable opposition. The first farmer somehow “knew that warn’t no artificial rain,” the second “reckoned it was a naterel thunder-storm,” and the third demanded proof that the shower was a Montgomery special. At a public meeting, Montgomery addressed the skeptical farmers:

  “I produced that rain myself,” said he. “It came, like all of my rains, in the night, when your hired man can’t be put to any practical use. I saw the country needed rain, and I went out last night while you slept and made it. Consequently today your fields rejoice and your grateful cattle low their mellow thanksgivings from pastures revivified and gladdened by my beneficent rain.” (735)

  Following this oration, a corn farmer rose and asked Montgomery if he was absolutely certain that it was his rain. “Every drop of it,” answered Montgomery. “Then,” replied the guileless farmer, “you are responsible for the ten acres of my corn which the storm washed away. I shall sue you for damages” (735). And he did, to the tune of $400.

  Adding editorially that “the science of rain-making is in its infancy” (which it always seems to be), Harper’s noted that the business of artificial rainmaking (or, for that matter, hurricane diversion or climate engineering) would always be vulnerable to lawsuits that would be impossible to prevent and devastating to the enterprise: “A rain-maker, without his umbrella, standing in the middle of a vast Kansas prairie watching his rain pour down in torrents, and his patrons’ crops ride gaily past on the hurrying flood and [with] no way to stop it, must be a most melancholy spectacle” (735). It seemed that Montgomery the rainmaker had not figured out a way to turn the rain off!

  Charles Hatfield, the “Moisture Accelerator”

  Charles Mallory Hatfield (ca. 1875–1958), who ran his proprietary operations mainly in the western states, garnered both widespread fame and quite some notoriety in the opening decades of the new century. Hatfield was born in Kansas and moved with his family to California as a youth, later working as a sewing machine salesman and eventually city manager of the Home Sewing Machine Company of Los Angeles. In 1898 he began to study meteorology; Elementary Meteorology, by William Morris Davis, was his favorite text, which he heavily annotated, and his favorite chapter, undoubtedly, was the one on the causes and distribution of rainfall.

  Hatfield turned to rainmaking in 1902, trying his first experiments on his father’s ranch in Bonsell, near San Diego. There he climbed a windmill and stirred and heated some chemicals in a metal pan, watching and waiting as the vapors rose into the sky. When a heavy rainstorm followed, it convinced him that his technique worked. He got into professional rainmaking on a bet, by claiming that he could produce 18 inches of rain in Los Angeles in the winter and spring of 1904/1905. Thirty prominent businessmen signed up to offer him $1,000 if he could accomplish this by May 1; the goal was exceeded a month early. Not that Hatfield had “done” anything. The long-term average rainfall in Los Angeles is 15 inches a year, more at higher elevations, and has ranged over the years from as little as 4 inches to more than 38 inches. Hatfield was lucky that year. The previous year’s rainfall total had been a meager 8.7 inches; in 1904/1905, the year of his wager, it was 19.5 inches; and the following year, without Hatfield’s involvement, it was 18.2 inches.

  What Hatfield had “done” was erect a high tower near Esperanza Sanitarium in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena and mix his noisome but ultimately harmless chemicals diligently throughout the winter. He believed that his technique worked best during the winter rainy season and at an altitude above 3,000 feet, two facts that he likely learned from Davis. When a reporter from the Los Angeles Examiner caught up with Hatfield in March, he described his theory as “a beautiful one”:

  When it comes to my knowledge that there is a moisture-laden atmosphere hovering, say, over the Pacific, I immediately begin to attract that atmosphere with the assistance of my chemicals, basing my efforts on the scientific principle of cohesion. I do not fight Nature as Dyrenforth, Jewell and several others have done by means of dynamite bombs and other explosives. I woo her by means of this subtle attraction.25

  His primary apparatus consisted of galvanized evaporation pans containing chemicals and water to be absorbed by the atmosphere, “where the fluid begins to work to attract and accelerate moisture.” He also used a standard weather bureau rain gauge to document his results. His first tower was 14 feet square and 12 feet high, with a small opening underneath to create an updraft and thus assist the evaporation. Working with his brother Paul, Charles said he stayed up most of the night, with Paul coming on duty from four to eight o’clock in the morning. Then Charles would work again until six in the evening, sleep for three hours, and get ready for the next night. One of the brothers was constantly on watch. They had devised several alarms “for the detection of unannounced visitors during the night,” and they kept a “small arsenal” inside their tent. Charles told the reporter, “I can assure you anyone who is looking for trouble will find it. I devote some time to hunting in the mountains.” Hatfield said his technique was much more subtle and less noisy and flamboyant than those of his predecessors, but that he charged much more. He claimed that he never wanted to apply to Washington for a patent, “for that would mean the publication of information and rain-producers would spring up like mushrooms all over the country” (as they did after 1947). When asked about those who were skeptical of his methods, Hatfield quickly added, “Censure and ridicule are the first tributes paid to scientific enlightenment by prejudiced ignorance” (8).

  Willis L. Moore, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, called Hatfield’s method “fake rainmaking” and pointed out that widespread and “excessive” rains were prevalent throughout the West that winter:

  It is, t
herefore, apparent that the rainfall which was supposed to have been caused by the liberation of a few chemicals of infinitesimal power was simply the result of general atmospheric conditions that prevailed over a large area. It is hoped that the people of southern California will not be misled in this matter and give undue importance to experiments that doubtless have no value. The processes which operate to produce rain over large areas are of such magnitude that the effects upon them of the puny efforts of man are inappreciable.26

  By operating in the climatologically established rainy seasons (usually in midwinter in California), by consulting U.S. Weather Bureau forecasts, by taking contracts in drought-stricken regions on the chance that conditions would improve, and by claiming success for any nearby shower, Hatfield was able to operate at a substantial profit. Billing himself in newspaper ads as a “moisture accelerator,” he built his tall, mysterious towers, usually in the hills and often near a lake, and equipped them with large shallow pans in which he patiently mixed and evaporated proprietary chemicals—until it rained. He used the “no rain, no pay technique,” with a clause in the contracts to cover his daily expenses in case of failure. Cynics said he was just betting his time against the expected fee that it would rain somewhere in the region during the contracted period. Hatfield’s claims extended over an area that was about 100 miles in radius, which increased his chances of apparent success a hundredfold, compared, for example, with a circle merely 10 miles in radius. The careful reader will note that any rainmaking technique, traditional or technological, will be followed by rain in a large enough designated area if the practitioner is sufficiently persistent. It may take weeks or months, but it will rain—eventually, somewhere, and sooner if the technique is practiced during the rainy season. If you extend the spatial dimension to cover the globe, it is raining very hard somewhere on the Earth right now; and if you wait long enough, it will rain where you are. Hatfield also fielded requests to suppress the rain. The following appeal, published in the local newspapers, was addressed to him concerning the weather in Pasadena in January 1905 for the Tournament of Roses Parade: “Great moistener if you will listen now, And make this vow: Oh, please, kind sir, don’t let it rain on Monday!”27

  Hatfield plied his trade along the West Coast and into Canada and Mexico. In the summer of 1906, following a drought in the Canadian Yukon and after his initial success in Los Angeles, the provincial governors became an “easy mark” for Hatfield’s self-promoting efforts. They awarded him a $5,000 contract for “meteorological experiments on the Dome,” the mountain peak near Dawson. The largest mining concerns raised an additional $5,000 by private subscription. According to the contract, should Hatfield fail to produce sufficient rain to satisfy a board of seven evaluators, he was to receive only his cost of transportation and shipping to and from the Klondike and maintenance for himself and an assistant.28

  These arrangements generated concerns in the Canadian Parliament a continent away in Ottawa. The Honorable George E. Foster, of North Toronto, was the most vocal: “Suppose that man Hatfield gets his apparatus to work and tinkers with the vast and delicate atmosphere of the universe; is it not possible that he may pull out a plug or slip a cog, and this machinery of the universe once started agoing wrong may go on to the complete submersion of this continent?”29 And what if damage is done across international borders?

  If this government starts Mr. Hatfield shooting up into the sky, discharging his wondrous and mysterious combination of chemicals into the atmosphere and interferes with the vast chain of atmospherical mechanism to which the United States has some claim as well as ourselves, what about the Monroe Doctrine? ... International complications, international conflagrations may take place, and for aught we know we may be involved in a tremendous bill for damages. (562)

  Foster thought that the weight of scientific opinion was not in favor of Hatfield: “I believe the United States [Weather] Bureau ... and they give it as their scientific opinion that he is an unmitigated fake and that anybody who has truck with Mr. Hatfield is very close to being bereft of good common sense. But that is only [the opinion of] a weather bureau. What is a weather bureau compared with the Yukon council and the Dominion government?” (563). The parliament ultimately decided that rainmaking was indeed the business of the local Yukon council, and Hatfield found away to claim “success” for his efforts.

  Hatfield was once described as “smiling, buoyant and fast talking, with a strong chin, large nose, high forehead and light blue, twinkling eyes ... a quietly dressed, slender man of middle height with square shoulders, who is crowding forty” (figure 3.4).30 By another description, he was “a man on a mission ..., wiry, bordering on downright skinny ... the greyhound narrowness of his face ... exaggerated by a long, aquiline nose ... yet ... possessed of a quiet charisma, a patina of self-confidence that belied his unimpressive physiognomy. On occasion, when he was in full flow, his piercing blue eyes could take on the glaze of the evangelist.”31

  3.4 Closely guarded to keep the inventor’s secret. Charles Mallory Hatfield’s rainmaking plant on the shore of Chappice Lake, Alberta: “A deck surmounted by an open tank containing chemicals.” The inset shows Hatfield. (“THE RAIN-MAKER: FIGHTING DROUGHT WITH CHEMICALS,” ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS, FEBRUARY 4, 1922)

  Hatfield is remembered largely because his rainmaking activities in January 1916 coincided with a severe flood in San Diego. According to city water department records, more than 28 inches of rain fell that month, the Morena Reservoir overflowed, and the Lower Otay Dam burst, sending a wall of water into downtown San Diego that killed dozens of people, left many others homeless, and destroyed all but 2 of the city’s 112 bridges. Seeking to avoid lawsuits, the city of San Diego denied its connection to Hatfield, who had a vague contract for rain enhancement, and never paid him the $10,000 he claimed was due to him. Hatfield pursued the suit against the city for two decades before it was finally dismissed, without payment, in 1938.32

  But Hatfield was not ready to cease his practice, and his services were sought across the country. In 1920 he took a contract in Washington State under the sponsorship of the Commercial Club of Ephrata. Hundreds of curiosity seekers gazed from afar at his strange tower on the shore of Moses Lake, from which mysterious gases were said to emanate. Nothing happened immediately, but soon after his departure the skies opened up, releasing a deluge. Skeptics saw no connection between the cloudburst and Hatfield’s earlier efforts, but the miracle man claimed the rain as his own, bearing his private brand—although he did admit that it arrived somewhat late. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported: “The wonder worker himself must admit that his process is somewhat crude and unfinished when his storms wander all over the state, washing out orchards and bursting canals. Possibly some legislation may be necessary to compel the rainmaker to hog-tie his storms in the future.”33 He was back in Washington State a year later at $3,000 an inch, and collected $4,000 an inch from the United Agricultural Association of Alberta, Canada, until, after 2 inches of rain fell, he was asked to “turn off the faucets.”34

  In 1922 he took his equipment to drought-stricken Naples, Italy. American papers reported that after the rains came, he was received as a hero, and the Italian government tried, unsuccessfully, to offer him 1 million lire for his secret. Two years later, the authoritative Monthly Weather Review informed its technically oriented readers that the rainmaker had failed in California and had folded his tower and silently left the Bakersfield area after falling well short of his goal of producing 1.5 inches of rain in a month.35

  Hatfield and the U.S. Weather Bureau had never been on good terms, although he knew the local officials personally and was a heavy user of weather bureau data, maps, and forecasts. He typically took contracts in areas that had experienced lower than normal precipitation and worked in seasons when rainfall might be expected to occur. This combination ensured that the local citizenry was desperate for rain, increased the chances of getting a contract, raised the price, and bettered the odds that
average or above-average rainfall—for which Hatfield could take credit—was just around the corner. In 1918 Ford Ashman Carpenter, the weather bureau station manager in San Diego and Los Angeles, looked back on several decades of attempted rainmaking in southern California. Without naming names (but clearly alluding to Hatfield), Carpenter recalled that the rainmaker “possessed a limited education” and lacked the ability to differentiate cause from effect. Using a system of “no rain, no pay” but still always collecting his expenses in advance, the rainmaker typically operated in the rainier months of January and February, after a dry autumn. Carpenter concluded that by far the most important feature of the rainmaker’s work consisted of playing on the credulity of the people: “It is therefore a psychological rather than a meteorological problem, for the fundamental factors are those of the mind and not of matter.”36 It is in this sense that Hatfield served as the model for Starbuck in the Broadway play The Rainmaker (1955). He was even invited to its Los Angeles premiere.